Often lost in the discussion of Bernstein v. United States, the court case that overturned and eventually eliminated US export restrictions on cryptography, is that the subject of the case, Snuffle, was an attempt to bypass the regulations itself.
Snuffle showed how to use a cryptographic hash function, which it was legal to export, as a strong encryption system, which was illegal to export. The irony of the case was that it was not the hash that was illegal, but the software that showed how to use it.
Snuffle source code is widely available on the Internet and included on the disks accompanying Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography. Although his court cases was dismissed in October 2003, Bernstein still has not published his cryptography pages or the technical papers describing Snuffle.
External links
Early copy of snuffle (http://www.dsinet.org/tools/crypto/snuffle/)
Snuffle is an encryption system designed by Daniel Bernstein and the subject of his court case, Bernstein v.
United States, the court case that overturned and eventually eliminated US export restrictions on cryptography, is that the subject of the case, Snuffle, was an attempt to bypass the regulations itself.
Snuffle showed how to use a cryptographic hash function, which it was legal to export, as a strong encryption system, which was illegal to export.
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